Euphoria Creator Sam Levinson Finally Reveals the Real Reason Behind [Spoiler]'s Death

Spoilers for Euphoria season 3, episode 7 ahead. If you watched Sunday night, you know the show finally went there with Nate Jacobs — and then some. Creator Sam Levinson just unpacked how that nightmare came together, why he wanted it to feel stomach-turning, and yes, how they did it with actual rattlesnakes.

So... what happened to Nate?

• In the penultimate episode that aired Sunday, May 24, Nate (Jacob Elordi) pays the price for his mounting debt — literally underground. He’s sealed in a coffin and left there for 72 hours.
• His wife, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney ), scrambles to cover the loan sharks to save him.
• Cassie and Maddy (Alexa Demie) manage to dig him up — only to find Nate is already dead from multiple rattlesnake bites.

Where that twisted idea came from

Levinson, 41, says the burial itself was a nod to one of his favorite films, The Candy Snatchers, where a character is buried with a pipe for air. That image lodged in his head for Nate: trapped below ground with only a thin tube connecting him to the world above.

The snake part hit Levinson on a very L.A. day — perfect weather, Otis Redding on the stereo, windows down, driving to Warner Bros. He pictured a rattlesnake slithering toward that air pipe, drawn by the vibration, sliding inside, and suddenly Nate is not just buried alive — he’s sharing the coffin with something that can kill him.

They used real rattlesnakes. Because of course they did.

Production shot the sequence out in Lancaster, California, and, according to Levinson, every snake you see is the real deal. The animal wranglers did not sugarcoat the risk: a bite could kill you in about an hour, and the nearest hospital was roughly an hour and a half away. Translation: do not get bitten.

Levinson on justice vs. nausea

While writing it, Levinson figured fans wanted Nate to get what was coming in the final season. He also wanted to make you squirm enough to question that desire in the moment.

I know what the audience wants in terms of justice or karma. The question is: how can I give it to them, but make it so horrific and anxiety-inducing that by the time it happens, they aren’t so sure they wanted it?

His goal, as he put it in an Esquire interview published Monday, May 25, was to spark that uneasy feeling where you catch yourself wondering, did he deserve this, or should it have been something else?

Elordi’s take

Elordi didn’t argue with the outcome. He called it a cool way for Nate to go out, noting the character’s long list of bad decisions and darker choices — and that it makes a certain cruel sense for everything to finally crash down like this.

It’s a gnarly mix of influences and logistics — a 70s thriller homage, a sun-drenched L.A. brainwave scored by Otis Redding, and a set full of actual rattlesnakes — all engineered to give viewers the payback they asked for and then make them second-guess it.